OUTDOORS GUIDE | Silence slipping away

Gordon Hempton has devoted his life to preserving silence in nature. Now losing his hearing, his mission isn't over.

Gordon Hempton of Indianola made a spot in the Hoh River Valley famous the world over as the "square inch of silence." Now losing his own hearing, Hempton is still working to protect quiet places in nature.

Gordon Hempton of Indianola placed a small rock to mark the spot in the Hoh River Valley recognized as the "square inch of silence."

Note: This story comes from the upcoming West Sound Guide to the Outdoors, a new quarterly magazine published by the Kitsap Sun. Look for the Outdoors Guide in Friday's edition, and find more information about the West Sound Guide family of publications at westsoundguide.com.

Deep in the Hoh rainforest, along an unmarked path made by elk, is a quiet grove carpeted with moss and framed by toppled old-growth cedars. Sitting on the largest log is a little red rock.

"That's it – that's the One Square Inch of Silence," says Gordon Hempton, the Indianola man who made this spot famous the world over.

In 2005, Hempton, an Emmy-award-winning sound engineer, dropped a red rock here, marking this tiny corner of Olympic National Park as the quietest place in the continental United States. It was an act more symbolic than scientific, but it drove home the point that the shrinking number of places that are truly free from human noise should be protected.

"Natural quiet is the antidote to the toxic noise that's all around us now," he said. "There is not one place on planet earth that's set aside for protection from noise pollution."

But for Hempton, the whole world may soon be silent. Hempton, who has made a career of recording the planet's natural soundscapes, is slowly going deaf.

"I started noticing it last spring, when I knew the birds should be really rocking and rolling," he said. "But I really knew when I was in bed one morning, and I asked my partner, 'do you hear the birds?' When she said 'yes' it ended all discussion. It was confirmed."

Hempton has circled the globe three times capturing the rarest nature sounds – "sounds which can only be fully appreciated in the absence of manmade noise." His work has been used by Microsoft, National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institute. In 1992, he won an Emmy for "Vanishing Dawn Chorus," a PBS documentary about natural soundscapes on six continents.

Losing his hearing, he said, is like a photographer losing his sight.

"I've wanted to maintain my optimism," he said. "But I've had to weep for the loss of all the beautiful sounds I couldn't hear."

Hempton is now deaf in his left ear and his right ear isn't catching the softer sounds in his recordings, making his job difficult and sometimes impossible.

There's now an urgency to two projects he considers his life's work – creating a vast library of natural sounds and preserving the purity of the One Square Inch site and the 366,000 acres of parkland that surround it.

"Olympic National Park is the least noise-polluted of any of the national parks in the lower 48," he said. "It's also sonically the most diverse. Those are two gold stars it has, and it I want to protect it."

The One Square Inch site has become a monument to silence, with people the world over making pilgrimages to the rock-marked grove every year. A teacher in China has one of the former markers to in his classroom for use in lessons about noise pollution. A Russian TV news crew recently visited the site and a German magazine is slated to stop in this month.

Park officials have been less enthusiastic.

"We don't tell people about that," said a poker-faced ranger at the Hoh ranger station when asked for directions to One Square Inch. Pointing to a map of the Hoh River Trail, he stressed that silence isn't limited to one inch – it can be enjoyed for miles.

Hempton agrees. Olympic has relatively few roads, and almost all of the park is designated as wilderness. The real problem, he said, comes from above.

It took only five minutes before a jet passed over One Square Inch on a recent summer day. For a moment, the engines overlapped the sounds of thrushes, yellow jackets and the distant hiss of the Hoh River.

With a sound meter in-hand, Hempton noted that the natural ambient sounds of the Hoh River Valley barely move the needle, pushing it no further than 30 decibels. But a passenger jet flying several thousand feet above a rainforest is so far beyond the norm that it is the sonic equivalent of an explosion in a living room.

"It's like a stick of dynamite," he said. "It's thunderous in comparison to the noise that's there naturally."

Hempton hopes that by bringing attention to One Square Inch, the entire park may one day become the nation's first federally-recognized "quiet place."

That would mean diverting all routine air traffic around the park – an idea that's been met with mixed responses.

Alaska Airlines promised to avoid the park during maintenance and test flights but would continue to follow the Federal Aviation Administration-approved flight path over the park for routine flights. American Airlines doesn't regularly fly over the park but agreed to steer clear. Hawaiian Airlines gave Hempton a written response saying it would ask its pilots to avoid the park but noted it rarely comes near.

The number flights over the park are likely to grow. An FAA report in 2009 predicted that the air traffic to and from the United States would more than double by 2025.

"That spells doom for quiet," Hempton said.

He also wants to limit tourism-related flights over the park. He points to Grand Canyon and Yellowstone as iconic national parks that have become the nation's noisiest, thanks largely to air tours.

"Aircraft are the number one noise polluters in wilderness areas," he said.

Olympic National Park hasn't taken a position on rerouting air traffic.

"That's really beyond the scope of the National Park Service," said Barb Maynes, Olympic's spokeswoman. "We do not have jurisdiction over airspace."

Hempton thinks Olympic is shrinking from one of its core duties.

"It's their job to protect wilderness. Wilderness includes natural quiet and natural soundscapes," he said.

He also thinks it's short-sighted for a park that has seen the annual number of visitors decline by nearly one million over the last two decades.

"Declaring the park the world's first quiet place isn't just good for people and the environment – it's good marketing," he said.

Attracting visitors who want to experience a rare sanctuary of silence would be a boon for the economically hard-hit communities surrounding the park, Hempton said.

"Tourism is one of the world's biggest industries, and the fastest-growing sector is eco-tourism," he said.

Hempton has founded a nonprofit, One Square Inch of Silence Foundation, and enlisted a board and several supporters to expand his campaign for quiet. They hope to get research permits from the park that would allow them to track the number of air traffic disturbances over the One Square Inch site. The data, they hope, will add more weight to their calls protections against intrusions from human-made sounds.

He'll need all the help he can get because the ability to do his day job – recording for films, television and other buyers of natural sounds – is fading fast.

Before his ears began to fail, Hempton was hard at work on his magnum opus – Quiet Planet, a library containing thousands of "pristine environmental sounds" – a desert thunderstorm, a tropical jungle at night, stones rolling with a North Pacific tide.

"You can pull from the library the slightest zephyr or the most snarling hurricane," he said.

But now only the louder sounds – the snarling rather than the slightest ones – register in Hempton's ears. He has had to enlist his friends to sit and listen for hours to his recordings, helping him find the sounds he's after.

He hopes the project will start paying dividends so he can get his ears fixed. Self-employed, Hempton has only catastrophic health insurance, leaving him with few options to get the care he needs. He's found two ear specialists who might be able to help, but it all starts with an expensive round of x-rays typically used to detect tumors.

"I'm still with hope. I still believe. I'm rooting for having perfect hearing again," he said.